NYC comic brings his stand-up to Matamoras

Sandy Marks once had a gig doing stand-up comedy standing on a bar between sports enthusiasts and the Final Four game they were trying to watch on television.

Jessica Cohen

Sandy Marks once had a gig doing stand-up comedy standing on a bar between sports enthusiasts and the Final Four game they were trying to watch on television.

And he once had a gig doing stand-up comedy after being introduced by a weeping woman to a room full of weeping people. It was a charity event where people had just finished telling tragic stories.

But more typically he plays Manhattan clubs such as Standup New York, the Comic Strip, LOL, and the Broadway Comedy Club, and also Jesters in Chester.

On Saturday night he will be headlining at the Riverview Inn in Matamoras, Pa., for Comedy Night, sponsored by the Pike County Chamber of Commerce.

Performing with him will be Brian Cichocki, also a regular at Manhattan comedy clubs.

Marks learned about comedy going with his mother to movies that were a little too old for him at age 6, such as "The Pink Panther," "Play It Again, Sam" and "Bananas." Woody Allen and Steve Martin inspired him, and by the time he was 13 he had memorized a Steve Martin album.

"It was his banjo playing with nonsequitur lines, the outlandish premises, and crazy endings," Marks says. "He was kind of weird."

Marks took comic stage roles, and then finally, at 24, gave stand-up a try. He took a class on creating a five-minute stand-up set.

"The teacher had us make a list of 15 things that make us mad and then stand up and talk about them," Marks recalls.

They practiced a few times, and then they had a show.

"I stood in the doorway between the room and the street and thought about running out, but I went up," Marks says. "I was timid."

Later he developed a more aggressive style. "Venues in New York forced me to be aggressive," he says. "Comedy has changed. Now there's no end until the audience leaves. Comics have spots until 3 a.m. People are exhausted, so you have to be loud and energetic."

Comedy has changed in other ways since the early 1990s when he started.

"People would act out bits onstage. It was more cartoonish then," Marks says. "Now it's more dry and realistic."

His topics range from dating to politics to the "absurdities of modern life." Lately he has bits on his quibbles with the English woman's voice giving him directions from his car's GPS and a riff on gender differences in texting.

"You shouldn't have to scroll down to read a text," says Marks, and he describes a long, digressive text message from a girlfriend.

He notices texts sometimes ridiculously replace serious conversations, but they are convenient, he says. Lately he has become intrigued with having followers on Twitter.

"I laugh at what I think," he says. "I think I have funny thoughts worth reading."